Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a blog post echoing calls to “pace the frontier” of AI development, outlining three broad strategies and committing the company to one of them. The post follows escalating safety warnings inside the industry, including the resignation of researcher Jacob Coxon, who said leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives” while builders “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Amodei did not mention Coxon directly, but said two factors convinced him to take a more cautious approach: the OpenAI-HuggingFace hack and the observation that “AI has been advancing drastically faster” in recent months, especially its “growing ability to build the next generation of AI.” He wrote that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” while acknowledging progress will still seem fast.

Amodei’s first strategy calls for “embedded evaluators” from third-party organizations like METR, who would verify that AI companies are actually following their pacing and safety commitments and ensure safety incidents get reported. He compared them to regulators embedded with bank employees, and said Anthropic is “unilaterally committing” to inviting them in, while calling on governments to require other frontier companies to match. That means giving evaluators company badges, desks, laptops, and access “mostly comparable to what internal risk assessment teams have,” with exceptions for legal or contractual obligations.

His second strategy asks leading AI companies “within democratic countries” to coordinate on “common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” Amodei acknowledged antitrust concerns, writing that “for antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” He also addressed the specter of Chinese AI dominance, arguing that steps like refusing to sell powerful chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to Chinese companies and cracking down on model distillation could “slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years.”

Third, Amodei called for “global coordination,” with the United States and its allies attempting to coordinate with authoritarian governments “to the extent this is possible.” He admitted “stark limits on what can be achieved” but suggested there might still be opportunities for agreement, even on narrow points like “prohibiting certain narrow and obviously dangerous uses of AI, such as using AI for the production of biological weapons.”

The post has drawn criticism from two directions. Some AI boosters, already skeptical of Amodei’s past warnings, see him as a doomer feeding the current backlash. Amodei responded that he has tried to offer a “balanced” perspective and that the backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust.” Industry critics, meanwhile, doubt the apocalyptic framing. Journalist Brian Merchant wrote that he has yet to see “a credible, step-by-step documentation of how exactly AI might move from self-recursively improving AI to killing every single human on the planet,” and suggested proposals like Amodei’s “would likely only wind up serving Anthropic and OpenAI; it’s what regulatory capture looks like in action.” Amodei closed by reaffirming his belief that AI can “enormously improve the quality of human life,” but insisted the benefits will only come if the technology is built “in the right way,” and that “it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right.”